BUILDING A COMMUNITY AS AN EMERGING ARTIST: AN INTERVIEW WITH RUBY VIDOR

"Those sparks of inspiration feel really spiritual, it didn’t come from me but from something or someone else."

Talking with artists have been one of our favorite additions to Forevermore, and we are more than delighted to be able to feature an interview with Ruby Vidor. Forevermore is deeply intertwined with music and being able to discuss with artists that we love is a great honour. We truly hope you will fall in love with Ruby as much as we did. ​

Ruby Vidor: My name is Ruby Vidor. I’m a singer-songwriter-producer based in London. I make…I don’t even know how to describe my music. I think I’m on a journey of discovering what kind of music I make but it’s really a pop love child of soul and folk with a love of storytelling, ethereal music to make you feel like you’re in a different world. An ethereal place but you’re also grounded at the same time. 
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Selma Tabti (interviewer): Should we start with the show you gave last week in London? 
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R.V: Yes, for sure! Last week was honestly so unexpected. I haven’t played a show in six months and performing live is my favorite thing to do. Writing and creating music is amazing but performing is so special to me. I’ve always been a performer and I just feel so comfortable there. This is this very crazy feeling that I get when I’m performing…I have everyone’s attention in the room. This is the closest thing that feels like meditation. This is this very amazing feeling to be one with everyone. I don’t think in life, I’ve ever found that same feeling. It’s so special to me and I love it. I was so excited to do it. I had no expectations, other than the fact that for my previous gig, I sold around 30 tickets. It was really great, so I was like "I’d love to sell more". I ended up doubling my ticket sales, so I was very happy about it. I went on stage knowing that there would be 60 people. I didn’t have this stress about the fact that no one would show up. When I got on, the room was just full of people and friends, but also for the first time and in my career so far, all these new fans, and people who discovered my music. I’ve never had actual fans coming to my show before so it was really cool. At the end of my show, I sang Steamy, the song that I’ve released a week before and when the chorus came, everyone started singing it! I literally forgot the words of my own song because I’ve never had people singing my songs with me before. It was such an amazing feeling, I’ve dreamed about it and it is literally on my vision board. I have a few things on my vision board that I wrote at the start of the year… I was looking at it the other night and I realised that a lot happened at my show. Having 60 people there was mental, it meant the world to me. It felt really rewarding that after three years of moving to London and a lot of work, people find my music and actually came to my show. It was amazing. 

S.T: It sounds amazing. I am so sad I’ve missed that! When you think about it, 60 people in a room is a lot. You sound so happy when you talk about it. What’s your favorite thing about being on stage? 

R.V: Oh, it actually changed now. I did my first gig at sixteen, so I’ve been performing for ten years now and I used to love the feeling of meditation, everyone connects to everyone is the room. This is my favorite feeling, being all present in this song right here. This is such a spiritual feeling to me. But also recently I’ve played so many gigs and so many gigs to empty rooms, strangers and loud bars when no one could hear me or know my music. I am so used to performing to impress people and performing to prove myself to people. I am so confident in my music that I can get on a stage and win people over, but I really need to get them. That’s why I really loved performing. It was always this feeling of trying and impress new people. But on Tuesday, at my last show, it kind of shifted. I didn’t have to prove myself and impress everyone because they were all here for me. This is this weird feeling when I can perform without trying to impress the people who listen to me. It felt so communal, and it felt like a group activity. This was my favorite thing about performing that night. 
S.T: That is incredible. It is definitely a new step into your music career.

R.V: Absolutely. It is a new feeling and I’ve never thought I would feel different things from performing. I just love singing. I used to play guitar and sing all of my songs; I used to be quite a folky songwriter but now that I’ve moved away from that and that I am able to bring my produced track on stage, I feel like at every gig I sing, I take one instrument off every song. When I just sing, I feel so present. It’s great to sing and play at the same time but I love to put the instrument down and perform by dancing and using my hands. One of my favorite parts is just singing to people. 

S.T: Let’s go back to your childhood, how was the music scene where you grew up? 
R.V: Oh, I was really lucky to grow up in Melbourne, Australia. A fun fact: Melbourne has the most live music venues per square capita in the world. It was packed with live music venues and I was really lucky to grow up there. I played my first gig at sixteen and then kept doing it all around Melbourne. It was like East London grungy venues, that was the vibes. I was so lucky to grow up in that city for that. My friends were also in a band, so I would jump on stage with them. It was a fun night for everyone, all my friends would come see us and it was so much fun. But I got to a point where I was, is this it? I want to level up, where’s the industry? And that’s when I’ve decided to move to London. I am really glad I did. 

S.T: Did it open more opportunities for you? 

R.V: I think so. All my influence back home were British artists like Holly Humberstones, and I’ve just realised that everything that is influencing my music is coming from the UK. I was like "London feels a good place to be" and I am so glad I did because I feel that now is the first time I have all these people connecting with my music. I also got more connection to the industry since moving here, it was definitely the right move. It took me six months to fully appreciate the city. It was such a culture shock from Australia. I am finally in a state where I am settled and I just love it. 

S.T : Did music play an important part of your childhood? 

R.V: Oh, yes. It all started with the guitar when I was eight-years-old. My mum side is all very musical, like at the end of dinner, all the guitars will come out and my uncle would start playing and singing. Every Christmas we still do that, we all had a few drinks, the guitar comes out and we’re all singing. My uncle was the first person to buy me my first guitar and he taught me. As soon as I got the guitar, I said that I wanted to sing. It was very natural. I remember he told me it was very difficult to sing and play at the same time, and remember thinking I would prove him wrong. I was completely dedicated to singing and playing. From that, I’ve started singing songs I liked and it led to writing my first song around eleven or twelve. I was just writing songs about my friends, and how some were mean to me. 

S.T: Would you say that getting your first guitar was the moment you really connected with music?

R.V: Yeah. It was a little red guitar, it was so cute. I got it during a family day, and you could not take it away from me. As soon as I got it, I was glued to it. 

S.T: Were they artist that you loved very early on, or an artist that really introduced you to music ? 

R.V: I used to love Australian music growing up. I had this very clear memory of having this Missy Higgins’ CD. Me and my dad would put it in the car when we were driving to my grandparents’ farm. We would drive just the two of us in the front seat, put the CD in and just sing the whole way. When I started to get older, I got one of The Veronicas and that was the time when I got into bands. But at eight-years-old, I was introduced to Beyoncé’s first album and it seriously changed my life. I was so obsessed. I went at her concert and my mind just totally exploded. The whole performance aspect and being able to perform music…Listening to a lot of folk, it was all singing and beautiful instruments but Beyoncé was performing. It was my first introduction to performing music. As I got older, I’ve still listened to a lot of Australian artists. My Dad used to sing a lot of James Taylor when I was younger, so he brought this folky element which I love, but then my mum got the best music taste ever. She is the disco queen, she loves a bit of housy disco stuff, and a lot of 70s disco. It kind of brought a little bit of soul into my life as well. I was listening to a lot of Sister Sledge. My mum would be dancing in the kitchen, it was a lot of disco and soul so I really think when growing up I got a lot of Australian folk influences, but also all of these soul disco. It was a rich mixed in between vocal performers and amazing storytellers.That’s where I want my music to go. 

S.T: And now, do you have artists that truly influence the music you create? 

R.V: Olivia Dean is definitely up there. Her songwriting, performance and production…everything she does, I just love it. Maggie Roggers is also one of my biggest inspirations. I am such a fan of hers. Every interview that comes out, I find her whole outlook on music so aligned in how I feel and I find it very relatable. Her music is incredible as well. So yeah, they’re probably my two number one. 

S.T: Do they influence your creative process in any way? 

R.V: Definitely Maggie does. Heard It In A Past Life altered the way that I think about melody and how I think about instruments. She completely expanded my whole world about how melody and instruments could sound like. I took a lot of influence from her. Olivia Dean really inspires me performance wise. Especially bringing her world to stage, and her styling and outfit really makes me kind of rethink what performance should look like. 

S.T: And now, what does your songwriting process look like? 
R.V: It’s very different. It changes all the time. I go through a very dry spell of creativity but when I’m like flowing – I am not that much of a hippie but I’m a little bit – but I really do think that when a good song is coming out of me, I feel like it comes from a deeper space, it comes from this boxes of inspiration. I really get these impulses of ideas and they’re always the best ideas so I always make sure to write them down. I have them in my phone so I go about my day but I still have a voice memo of a melody that just comes to me. I really think they’re the most special things. Those moments are really important to me so I always make sure to write them down or record them. The first thing I do when I sit down at my studio setup is bringing out all those notes and memos, and I start to flesh them out. If I were to sit down and start writing without any of those, I would be able to write a song but it never comes out as special. Those sparks of inspiration feel really spiritual, it didn’t come from me but from something or someone else. It’s like it’s being passed to me like “you need to create something around that” and it doesn’t happen a lot, that is just for my good songs. For River, I think I was literally on the toilets and I was doing my things and the chorus just came to me. Nectar came to me in the shower. I knew they were really special songs. I got a lot of songs but I don’t think they’re good because I didn’t get this spark. It’s a really hard thing because I can’t wait for it to happen. Right now, I haven’t written a song in six months. I need to find a different process because I can’t wait and sit around for something to happen. My favorite way of creating is definitely feeling this spark, but I still write songs without it. 

S.T: Can you be inspired by other forms of media such as literature or cinema? 

R.V: This is going to be such a hot take but I don’t lack inspiration. I don’t usually get inspired by other things. Yes, visually when I am building worlds around my songs. I can listen to songs and think I could create something like that but I don’t usually turn to other media for inspiration. I really try to keep my songs in my own world, I want them to come from such an authentic place, and I don’t usually feel inspired by other music or films. I feel like it kind of limits me and I’d rather go internal and find inspiration within myself. I find a lot of inspiration from meditating, clearing my mind, because I feel like I open my channels up to receive inspiration that comes from a deeper place. I try to not bring the outside in my writings, I want it to come from me. 

S.T: I really like your take. Everything is original and comes within you. 

R.V: When I go into a session with other producers, I usually bring some tracks to listen to in order to set the vibe and give some kind of direction. I do bring music that I am listening to or that I like the sounds of, but when I write on my own, I try to block out the rest of the world. 

S.T: In terms of creativity and inspiration, how much of your songwriting is inspired by love? 

R.V: Yeah, absolutely. When I don’t have anything interesting going on in my life…well, I was known in high school for writing about everyone else. I was inspired by my friends’ situations. They would break up with their boyfriend and I would just write a song about it. That definitely shaped how I write music. I would write about everything that happened. I remember being sixteenth or seventeenth and me and my boyfriend just broke up. I was heartbroken. I was at a party a week later and a girl from school kissed him. I was absolutely devastated. It happened on a Saturday night and by Sunday I had a whole song written about her, calling her out, not in a mean way but..yeah. I got asked to sing at a school assembly on  Monday and I performed that song, completely outing her. All the teachers were like…okay, fair, that was a great song. So yeah, I was always inspired by what was happening around me. As I get older, I think it is changing because I try so hard to live a content life, surround myself with good people. I want my life to be really peaceful and amazing, so I kind of lost that feeling of heartbreak…I recently discovered the power of writing stories about things, like a universal concept. I am starting to see music as a fun way of storytell. When I come back to write about myself, and what’s happening in my life and my friendships, they’re usually the most special. 

S.T: Do you think it’s easier for you to communicate your feelings through songs? 

R.V: Yeah, definitely. I wrote a song to my little sister, and I’ve probably had to say a lot more in this song that I could probably say in person. 

S.T: Going back to your music and streaming, you put some demos on Soundcloud. What makes you decide that a song can come out on Spotify? 

R.V: That’s such a good question. It’s so ruled by social media now, the whole culture around teasing music and it has been such a massive thing recently. I used to know after writing a song if it was good enough to be released on Spotify. That has been thrown away by the whole culture of teasing music. Steamy is my last release and I only released it because it did really well when I started teasing it on Tiktok. I was really surprised and I thought I might just embrace the system instead of fighting it. I tease a bunch of songs and whatever works, I just release. That’s what I did with Steamy, it was great to do it that way. Why not give people what they want if they like that? I am so in my own world when I am writing music, I don’t really know what’s going to connect and resonate with other people so it’s a really interesting approach when it comes to releasing music. The song I am working on now, which is called On The Run, I haven’t teased it, I’m just going to release it because I love it so much. 

S.T: You should do both of them. Don’t stop yourself from releasing music!

R.V: I know, but it’s such a risk to flop…I think teasing it’s such a safe way to make sure people like the song. But it also stripped a lot of the creativity and artistic integrity behind the release, and that element of surprise, but also what’s the point of releasing a music that doesn’t resonate with people? I am still working that out. 

S.T: You’ve mentioned that Steamy was not intended to be released. You said it was more like a writing challenge for you. What changed your mind ? 

R.V: It was literally the people. I had so much fun writing it because there was no pressure. When I finished it, I didn’t know if it was a good song but I had so much fun writing it. It was a challenge for me to be more loose with my writing. I posted it on Tiktok and people commented saying that they loved it. I only released it because people liked it. I don’t know if I would have chosen that song to be honest. That’s cool, sometimes it’s not about me. If I just wanted to be about me, I wouldn’t release music at all. As soon as I want to release something and put it into the world, it’s because I want other people to hear it. I want to share my music with them and it’s better if it resonates with them. 

S.T: How does presaves work for you in terms, is it a big deal as an indie artist? 

R.V: Yeah, it really is. What it does is that it gives Spotify data, and helps with the algorithm. If you have zero or fifty, it just gives a little bit of data to Spotify to push it out algorithmically when the release comes out. Currently, 63% of Steamy streams comes from the algorithm, so radio play and algorithmic playlist. In order to get the algorithm to pick up a song that people would want to listen to, presaves are so important. 68% of my streams come from algorithmic playlists. I think it only happened because presaves give that data to Spotify. I do think it is really important. 

S.T: Do liking and putting the song in your own playlist also boost your music? 

R.V: Yeah, totally. Doing that only makes up 15% of my streams. While it is important, it is not the biggest drive for my streams, it is the algorithm. .

S.T: Do you think most of your listeners come from Tiktok or from Spotify’s algorithm? 

R.V: Hm…When I was playing at my last gig, I asked people when they found me and a lot said Tiktok. I was really surprised because I don’t have a lot of followers. 

S.T: I feel like people are most leaning towards listening to indie artists in the way that they want this sense of community. It is probably because of the price of concert tickets now. Yes, I feel like more people want to lean into this indie music community. 

R.V: That is so interesting. I am so wrapped up in my own artist perspective that I haven’t thought about it. 

S.T: Yeah, I feel people start to want to go back to small gigs. It is what happened with Erin Lecount a couple months ago. She started with “Silver Spoon” and now she is playing shows, and maybe touring as a headliner. 

R.V: That makes so much sense. People are totally craving that, being part of a small fandom. I try to create that with my Patreon because people want that intimacy with group chats. I’ve been trying to put a lot of effort into creating this sense of community. It is so important. It is crazy to see that I would just put a Tiktok of me dancing in my garden to the sound of my songs and the same day my streams spiked. Another girl posted my songs to one of her Tiktok and that same day, my stream spiked so it really helps. I’ve seen amazing results on Tiktok.

S.T: Discovering artists on TikTok also gives the chance to small artists to find their community without being a nepobaby. I really like Sam Fender’s take on that. He said “The music industry is 80% who are privately educated. A kid from where I’m from can’t afford to tour, so there are probably thousands writing songs that are better than mine, poignant lyrics about the country, but they will not be seen because it’s rigged.” (The Sunday Times). 

R.V: Oh my god absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. At the moment, there’s a big lack from the industry of wanting to invest or take a gamble on new artists. If I was a nepo baby, I could probably get a lot of advice and tips from my circle. As someone who doesn’t have any family members in the industry, it is quite hard. You need people to give you a chance, help you and develop you, but you have to do it on your own. There’s a lack of wanting to invest in talents that need help to develop.

S.T: Absolutely, that is why fanbase/fangirls really do help you when you are not supported by the industry. 

R.V: Oh my god absolutely. When I was at my gig, all the girls that came were so devoted. They knew every word and this is what it is all about. Fuck everything else. The community I am creating is all that matters. I am not interested in chasing the industry now, like chasing managers or labels. I am just interested to know how I could get more people to come to my show. I would love to do music full time, but there’s so many steps to go big. Where do I put my attention? Is it chasing down labels, getting a manager involved? I have been trying so hard, but on Tuesday I just realised I just foster these people that come to my show and slowly grow that group hoping that someday we could be a thousand. 

S.T: Going back to your music, I saw that River has reached more than 80 000 streams. Do you think River changed your music career, whether it is in a small or big way? 

R.V: Absolutely. Whenever I put a song out, I don’t know how people are going to connect with it. I put out a lot of music before River but it was the first song that people felt all connected to. I was getting messages from people saying that River helped them in their breakup. That changed a lot because it brought so many new people. It is crazy because I never knew it was going to happen. I could write a million songs and you don’t know which one is going to hit people’s heart. River did that and it was amazing. It really helps expose me to other people. I didn’t think River was the best. I also thought Nectar and Drive would do better than River. I did not think it would pop off like it did. It was a real lesson because I just don’t know. I am really excited. If it hits 100 000 streams, it would be crazy. It is on my vision board. River also gave me a lot of confidence because I didn’t release music for a while before River. I was holding them for a while, I wrote them four years prior to their release and I was really scared to release them. It was also the first track I’ve produced on my own. I was really going through all these thoughts, like I can’t be a producer, I am just a singer. So much head noise came before releasing River. Seeing that it resonates so much with people gave me so much confidence to go ahead with my career. It was the confidence boost that I needed. It came at the right time. 

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Loved getting to know Ruby through this interview? We'd love to hear your thoughts, drop a comment here or connect with us on socials. And be sure to check out Ruby's pages (@rubyvidor on Instagram): she’s performing all over London right now, and it’s not to be missed!